Tim Worstall is a Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, and one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. His book, Chasing Rainbows, on the economics of climate change, is available at Amazon.

Explaining how politics really works

The Aldersgate Group have urged the Government to slash carbon emissions

A letter has been released from the Aldersgate Group, saying how terribly important it is that we have a firm target for carbon emissions reductions for 2030.

Perhaps this is important, perhaps it isn't. But what is interesting is what it tells us about how politics works today and about how we are governed.

So who is this Aldersgate Group? As you can see here, they're a civil society group: a voluntary organisation coming together and attempting to make the world a better place. Nothing wrong with this at all: freedom of association and lobbying of government is as vital to a free society as freedom of speech.

However, there is a problem when we look at the actual organisations which are members. The Environment Ministry itself is a member. So is the Forestry Commission and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. Then there are various more or less taxpayer funded organisations like the WWF, Woodland Trust and so on. Even those organisations that we might think are properly private sector, or at least voluntarily funded, seem to be less than completely so.

Take, almost at random, Bioregional. You can see their accounts here. Page 42 lists the sources of their income. Out of what looks like around £1.5 million in income, there's some £200,000 from the Department of the Environment and Rural Affairs, near another £100,000 from DECC, £160,000 from the London Waste and Recycling Board (yes, that's government of a kind again) and even £60,000 from WWF.

It's very difficult to think that this is some independent group of concerned citizens making their case. Rather, one can see at least the glimmerings of government lobbying government by cycling money through supposedly independent groups.

New research, released today, reveals the true extent of government funded lobbying by charities and pressure groups. Having back-tracked on the charity tax, George Osborne now needs to tackle government funding of charities.

This report argues that, when government funds the lobbying of itself, it is subverting democracy and debasing the concept of charity. It is also an unnecessary and wasteful use of taxpayers’ money. By skewing the public debate and political process in this way, genuine civil society is being cold-shouldered.

It has been said that Friends of the Earth Europe receives some 50 per cent of its budget from the European Union and that 100 per cent of Friends of the Earth Europe's attention is on lobbying the European Union. This may indeed be how the Continentals do it, but it's a practice that we really don't want to become engrained here. For it is a distortion of that very civil society which is so vital to a free and functioning democracy.

Perhaps we should have a carbon target for 2030, perhaps we shouldn't. But it's an outrage that our tax money is being used to fund those who would lobby government for their preferred policies. Everyone has a right to combine, to cooperate, to lobby, most certainly we all do. But we have to do it with our own money, not with everyone else's taxes.